Pulitzer Prize (Fiction) (1968)

This Pulitzer Prize winning novel, which recounts the fact based tale
of one of the few slave uprisings in the Ante-bellum South, raises three
basic questions--one inane, one unanswerable and one that's really interesting.
We'll take them in that order.

First off, there is the really insulting, but more importantly just
plain stupid, question of whether a white southerner should be allowed
to write a novel about slavery and tell it from the slave's point of view.
When the novel was published, black critics actually argued that it was
a story that only a black person could tell and that Styron had committed
some kind of thought crime in adopting a black persona for his narrator.
This criticism barely even warrants a serious response. Writers of
fiction imagine things and then write them down. If we restricted
them only to what they know at first hand, we'd have nothing but autobiographies.
Obviously, this argument pretty quickly collapses under its own weight.

Perversely enough, in the unintentionally hilarious introduction to
ex-con Edward Bunker's book Dog
Eat Dog, Styron himself, who has also written novels from the perspective
of a woman and a Holocaust victim (Sophie's
Choice--see Orrin's review),
as well as a slave, argues that the only story that authors can not wholly
imagine is that of a criminal in modern America. (Apparently we can
take that to mean that he's not planning a crime novel.) Styron,
arguing that only crooks can write about crooks, should have known better,
especially in light of his personal experience. The writing of fiction
requires author's to portray characters who are significantly different
than themselves--different life experiences, different gender, different
race, different sexual orientation, etc.--get over it.

At any rate, he did have the temerity to write this book. It is
told in the form of a confession (a real
one actually exists) by Nat Turner, a slave in Southeastern Virginia
who in 1831 led a band of escaped slaves on a rampage, slaughtering around
60 whites before being stopped on their way to seize the arsenal in nearby
Jerusalem. Turner who managed to evade capture for an additional
six weeks, was finally caught, tried and hung; but not before dictating
a confession to Mr. T.R. Gray.

Turner and Gray are plagued by two very different issues. Gray
and his fellow whites ask what could possibly have driven the blacks to
such drastic action against their benevolent masters. Turner wonders
why more blacks did not join him and why so many in fact opposed him.
The answer to the first question is obvious. The second poses a more
interesting dilemma. Why were such rebellions not more prevalent
and this one having broken out, why did it not attract more participants?
This question, like that of why Holocaust victims did not put up more resistance,
seems to me ultimately insoluble and Styron offers us little guidance.

The final question implicated here is what could have possibly impelled
Turner and his cohort to squander their hard won liberty on senseless revenge
killings, rather than fleeing North to Freedom. In a broader sense
this brings us to the question of what should be the goal of liberation
movements generally and it is this issue that is most interesting, has
clear answers and had obvious implications for the subsequent course of
race relations in America. Despite achieving some viscerally satisfying
retribution on local whites, Turner and his band are ultimately destroyed
by their dubious decision to hang around and try to slaughter every white
they can find, instead of getting the heck out of Dodge. Why didn't
they flee? Certainly, they could not have met a worse fate that way
and they might even have made it to Freedom. But this is the fundamental
choice that faces all men at all times. The retributive slaughter
that Turner chose is simply Liberal politics writ large. It is premised
on the ideals of equality and leveling, pulling down those who are above
and reducing them to the level of the lowest common denominator.
The alternative choice, of flight and uncertain freedom, is the Conservative
option and requires confidence enough to face the prospect that one will
fail in the attempt to rise up by dint of ability and hard work.

Nat Turner's counterproductive choice, of equality over freedom, has
become the favored course of today's racial politicians. Affirmative
action, reparations, etc. are all merely attempts to punish whites and
use government restraints to cripple their capacity to succeed. In
the same way that Turner could not rally himself and his troops to head
for the North, the black political establishment and their white Democrat
allies have decided that Freedom is too uncertain a proposition; better
the guarantee of quotas than the risk of competition.

In this sense, The Confessions presents an eternal human dilemma and
Styron's Turner correctly presages the choice that would be made by future
generations of American blacks. Sadly, the results have been similar.
I suppose that it is possible that blacks could not possibly compete with
whites in a free market, but the implications of this would be dire indeed
for our species. To believe blacks incapable of success in the marketplace
is to believe them inferior; a belief which ironically enough conservatives
reject and liberals embrace.

Moreover, latching on to artificial social engineering devices like
affirmative action has clearly not benefited most blacks much; it is even
questionable whether the direct beneficiaries have been helped more than
they have been degraded. The assumptions of inferiority and disability
which underlie these programs has certainly resulted in enormous resentments
on the part of both those aided by the quotas (see authors like Thomas
Sowell, Shelby Steele & Clarence Thomas for excellent discussion of
the social and personal stigma that attaches to those who are theoretically
supposed to be aided by quotas) and those whites who are denied opportunities
because of them.

At the end of Nat Turner's rebellion all you had left were one heck
of a lot of dead people and a newly imposed skein of repressive state restrictions
to try to prevent a recurrence. One hardly expects the era of Affirmative
Action to leave the field littered with corpses, but we've certainly been
saddled with the authoritarian regulations and it seems entirely possible
that it will prove just as unproductive as Nat Turner's Rebellion.
Government coerced "equality" is no substitute for ability, expectation
and effort.

You see, the final irony of this episode is that Nat Turner succeeded.
At the end of the day he had wrought a brutal and destructive equality
upon his society. He, his compatriots and their white oppressors
all ended up at the same level--six feet underground. One assumes
that we can all recognize the pyrhic nature of such a victory. The
tragedy of Nat Turner's rebellion is not that it ended in so many death's,
that was his aim. The tragedy is that he saw this as a desirable
outcome. When you sow the wind of equality, you reap the whirlwind
of destruction. At this late date in human affairs, one would hope
that uncertain even chaotic as it can be, freedom offers mankind the better
option, just as it would have been the wiser choice for Nat and company.

Comments:

I don't think that this review was entirely fair. There are things that you criticize on that don't even make any sense. Like when you said Styron offers us little guidance as to why other slaves didn't join Nat in the rebellion. Of course he wouldn't guide us in that, he wrote the book from the POV of Nat and Styron writes that Nat asks himself the same question. I know that Styron was simply writing there and we don't know if Nat actually thought about that, but if he had he wouldn't know the answere would he? No. So why would Styron write it like Nat knew the answer. Then you go ahead and make your own interpretations of the story and then criticize Styron further for not showing those different dillemas you created. I actually recall Styron saying at the start of the book that you can make your own way with the book but he did not write it with any moral intentions. So saying that i don't see how one could criticize him for things like that.

- Charles Mersereau

- Mar-29-2007, 23:28

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I feel that this argument is completely biased. You say that liberals support the idea that blacks couldn't succeed in the free market, and that conservatives believe the opposite. I reallly hope you're kidding with that one... what would make anyone think that a gang of escaped slaves from the south are 1.) literate 2.) know how to conduct business, and 3.) have consumers...??? I'm sorry, maybe I was misunderstood, but if that's what you meant then you're point has major holes.

- Lauren O'Brien

- Oct-05-2006, 23:22

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I find this told from a partisan who speaks of what he or she does not know. As a writer, to tell a truly honest story one cannot put on a persona with which they are unfamiliar. It causes problems of perspective. While you clearly have some faith in William Styron's honesty, I do not. Also, while some would like to embrace the "Confession's" document wholesale, I cannot fathom why in that context one would think that a slave of Nat Turner's caliber would divulge the turth to a man like Thomas Gray, someone who just wanted to get rich and someone who was a slave owner. Sometimes, context is everything.

-

- Dec-18-2005, 11:14

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Sophie's Choice isn't told from the perspective of a female holocaust survivor, but rather from the perspective of Stingo, a Southern writer.